I
have read that you will soon be visiting Hiroshima where you plan to
say something about dropping the first atomic bomb. I thought you
might be interested in hearing from someone who has been involved
with that awful reality in several surprising ways.

I
joined the U.S. Navy in the spring of 1945. After I left boot camp, I
was assigned to begin training that would make me the operator of a
landing craft. No doubt you’ve seen these fragile ships. The
casualty rate among the crews was high. In our case it was almost
certain to be extremely high. We were told that we would participate
in the invasion of Japan. We had seen how fiercely the Japanese
resisted seaborne assaults on various Pacific islands, especially
Okinawa, where kamikaze pilots – suicide bombers with wings –
also became part of their weaponry. In public most of us played tough
sailors and worked hard at acquiring the necessary skills. But in
private most of us knew we had received a near death sentence.

You
can imagine our reaction when we awoke on the morning of August 6,
and learned that the Army Air Force had dropped a bomb on Hiroshima
that was so powerful, it virtually guaranteed Japan’s surrender.
The celebrations in and around our barracks were wild. No one stopped
to think of how many Japanese had been killed. The war had become a
murderous business long before we reached this apparent climax.
Almost all of us were in our teens. I was 17. Sympathy did not figure
strongly in our emotions, compared to the realization that we might
live, after all. With somewhat less intensity, I think this emotion
was shared by the millions of American parents of the soldiers and
sailors who were also preparing for the invasion.

Hiroshima
did not produce a Japanese surrender. A second bomb was dropped on
Nagasaki. Only then did the Japanese agree to talk peace. Nineteen
years later, I was an historian with several successful books on my
record. I was at West Point, writing a history of the US Military
Academy. One of the first men I met was the head of the Association
of Graduates, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves. During the war, he
had led the Los Alamos project that built the atomic bombs. The
general talked freely to me about his role in the process. Aside from
keeping the whole incredibly complex operation on schedule, he was
proudest of his insistence that we would have to build more than one
bomb. Many of the scientists involved were so horrified by the weapon
that they thought it would be immoral to make more than one. Groves
calmly informed them that it would take at least two bombs to make
the Japanese surrender. “Can you imagine how ruinous it would have
been, if we had only made one bomb?” he asked me. “We would
have looked like fools. The Japanese would have been encouraged to
fight to the death.”

Fifteen
years later, I was in independence, Missouri, talking to ex-
President Harry S Truman, the man who made the decision to drop the
bomb. I was working on his biography, in collaboration with his
daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel. Mr. Truman told me the story of how
he came to drop the bomb. It was much more complicated than I
imagined it would be.

Not
long after Franklin D Roosevelt died and Truman became president,
Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally and the United States turned
its full attention to the war with Japan. Mr. Truman discussed the
situation with the White House staff he had inherited from FDR. They
told him that Japan was defeated, but Tokyo refused to surrender
unconditionally. Mr. Truman said that did not bother him in the
least. He would be happy to negotiate a reasonable peace with them.
He had never approved of the doctrine of unconditional surrender,
which FDR had concocted in 1942 to make us sound more formidable to
the Germans. It had only intensified the Nazis’ determination to
resist, even when they knew the war had been lost. Millions of men
and women had died by prolonging the war.

The
entire White House staff rose in fury at Mr. Truman’s statement.
They told the new president that if he abandoned unconditional
surrender, he would be guilty of stabbing the Democratic Party in the
back. The voters would never forgive him. Meanwhile the Army and the
Navy were planning the invasion of Japan. They warned the president
it would be an immense bloodbath, perhaps a half million American
casualties and three or four times that number of Japanese.

With
great reluctance, Mr. Truman authorized the use of the bomb on
Hiroshima. It seemed to him the lesser of the two evils. It would
save American as well as Japanese lives. As General Groves predicted
in a memorandum to the president, Japan did not surrender after
Hiroshima. The president had to authorize the dropping of the second
bomb on Nagasaki. Only then did Emperor Hirohito call on his army
and navy to cease fighting. Preserving Japan was more important than
victory.

In
the opening negotiations the Japanese urged the United States to let
them retain Hirohito as their emperor. Without his supposedly divine
voice, it might be impossible to persuade a majority of their people
to accept peace. Although this proposal violated the principle of
unconditional surrender, President Truman agreed. On August 29,
General Douglas MacArthur and his staff flew to Japan with the
Eleventh Airborne Division and were received peacefully. A formal
surrender took place on the deck of the battleship USS
Missouri
on September 2.

The
American occupation that followed the surrender was unique in world
history. Although a few war criminals were punished, the emphasis was
on transforming Japan from a feudal oligarchy into a reasonably
democratic country. It succeeded beyond almost everyone’s hopes and
today remains an achievement worthy of admiration. This improbable
outcome of the savage war with its atomic climax seems to me worthy
of comment and even of praise.